Glossy fine print magazines are horrible on anything less than a 9.7" retina display. The 10" is for the sofa. The smaller tablets are for everywhere else, so they have more usage scenarios. But I wouldn't give up the 10" form, as it is well suited to the sofa.

Perhaps it was also a better size to kickstart the market. Obviously not a phone, nor a netbook, nor a laptop.

Naturally most of Jobs' public comments were marketing hyperbole. His job and his passion were designing and promoting Apple products. Only a fool would expect him to endorse something he didn't believe was right. This story, though, is a classic what-if. Before the iPad, the current tablet market did not exist. There is no way to know if the current market would exist if the first iPad screen was smaller than 9.7" diagonal. Thus, it is impossible to answer the question posed. We cannot know if Jobs was wrong.

Narrowly looking at sales figures just after the mini was available & attempting to draw long term conclusions is extremely premature. The 7 inch iPad is selling better at present because of the people who wanted a smaller iPad but couldn't buy one.

Some people who had a 10 in iPad are now migrating to the 7s but the great majority are happier with the larger screen. Once the pent up demand is satisfied I expect the larger iPads will again be the better sellers.

What he did wrong is: pick one size and anoint it The One True Size. Different people want different sizes for different uses. (Right now, I hear a lot of requests for larger tablets).

Jobs' ability to choose and decide was a blessing and a curse: it keeps the company hacks in line and Jobs was usually right... but he was also sometimes wrong, and, above all, sometimes "picked a winner" when there was room for more than 1 device.

During the 2010 Christmas shopping season, Steve Jobs famously dissed the 7-inch tablets being rolled out by competitors, including Samsung's Galaxy, as being 'tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the [9.7-inch diagonal] iPad,' adding that 'the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA â" dead on arrival.'

He was right - emphasis on "current crop". Despite announcing that they had shipped 2M Galaxy Tabs to stores in Jan 2011, they only managed to sell 1.4M by Q2 2012 [wikipedia.org].

It was easier to make a decent small tablet later than it was earlier due to technology improvements. If the first iPad was 7.9" but otherwise used the same battery technology, you'd have seen a lot of people complaining about the battery life - the third generation iPad had a 70% greater capacity than its predecessor, and those improvements to the technology will have made a significant different to the utility of a smaller iPad.

Of course the Mini is cheaper, but not by much â" $329 vs. $399 for the larger iPad, for the baseline model with WiFi only and 16KB storage.

That's 16GB storage, not 16KB.

I'm not quite sure why it matters since 7.9 inches does not equal 7 inches.

And that's why a lot of people choose to go straight to palliative care. They might extend their life by 6 months to a year, but the side affects of the treatments are so horrible and you're going to die anyway they'd rather choose the easy path.

That's a problem with the magazines. Reading magazine style content formatted for a 7" screen, like Google Player magazines or Flipboard or Currents or Pulse or any of the many others out there, is fine. The problem only surfaces when magazines try to throw out a PDF of the print version, in which case even a 10" display is inadequate unless you like zooming a lot.

7" is easier to hold, easier to read full width sentences on and easier to take with you without having to switch to another device. They are not bad to type on either, for a touch screen.

This is Apple's (or was Job's) problem all over though - declaring anything the one true way. It's why you end up with a lot of die hard Apple fan boys, religious zealotry of a sort. Don't get me wrong, I'm a PC guy with an iPhone. I like my iPhone, but it's never made me want to go all Apple. That's partly because I believe a monoculture is bad for computing, and partly because I really, really, really, with a passion*, hate iTunes.

* So much so that when a time machine is invented I'm going for the retroactive abortion route on the creators.

I think it does matter. Jobs was even right about the big size being needed, though his explanation given was wrong (and who knows if he even told the full truth). If tablets had initially come at 7" then they would have been far too close to phones. There would have been almost no application that you could do on a tablet that couldn't be done reasonably on a phone just a bit worse. There wouldn't have been a reason to keep the two separate and development of tablet interface programs would be much slower. In the end people would have just called the iPad a "too big phone which you can't call from" and it would not have sold as it did. I think Android is only just managing to break through this barrier and Apple wouldn't have had nearly the success they have had first mover advantage.

The iPad is its self almost exactly the maximum reasonable size for a tablet for most people. Even a tiny bit heavier than the heaviest iPad and many people can't hold it in one hand it for long. It's already big enough that it has to have a special split keyboard for some people to be able to type on comfortably. Also the iPad is close to the limit which fits comfortably into your personal space in economy class (no; a laptop is not "comfortable") and feels spacious elsewhere. On the other hand; the size is a limitation for some applications such as a full screen magazine spread. The battery is a limitation as a replacement for a book. For photo editing, a thing which a tablet could be good for the screen is still very much on the small side. You can see why really big people with big hands and their own private jets might like a bigger tablet and you can also see why Microsoft made the mistake of making the surface too big and heavy. If you were designing the iPad from scratch and you could make it fold and add anti-gravity and had no cost limts then you would probably end up with an even larger device with more inertia and much higher resolution (I wouldn't call it more "weight").

An iPad mini makes sense now; however that's only because the iPad went before it and defined the category of a tablet. If that hadn't happened people would just be complaining that it's a too heavy phone. Me; I have multiple android devices and I find myself switching sizes; however I definitely prefer a tablet to a phone for plenty of stuff. I'm even wondering if it wouldn't be better to just have a dumbphone and a tablet instead.

When the 9.7" came out, people were mocking it as simply a "bigger iPod touch" with no market. This problem would only be amplified with a smaller, 7" form factor.
The 9.7" made it clear that it was in a market of it's own - it's not simply a slightly bigger phone, nor a netbook without the keyboard.
Considering the iPad's success, I think that it's pretty clear they got it right (with profits) either way.

Now, with Steve bashing the 7" screen factor - but OF COURSE! He's a salesman - naturally he'll work hard to tell you why his product is better, and why you shouldn't buy other alternatives.
Then again, there's some truth to his opinion: having had an iPad for 3 years and moving on to a 7", I felt like the tablet wasn't offering me enough screen estate to justify bringing it out all the time - my 5" smartphone could do everything just as well. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that for some people, a 7" tablet is sufficient for their purposes.

With the rise of 5.5" and larger smartphones though, I personally think 7" tablets are becoming a smaller market. If I want something bigger than my smartphone, I'd be looking for a 9" and bigger device, not a 7" one. The only thing 7" has going for me is the price.

Uh, sorry, but with the advent of the Pixel, which costs significantly more than both put together and is far less functional than either, Google fans now wear the cost-no-object crown. iPad owners are downright frugal in comparison.

.... for ONE reason: weight.

I think the 10" form factor is better - the keyboard is SO much easier to use. But it is just too heavy. If they can get the weight of the 10" model down a bit to something like 3/4 of what it currently is, I think they're on a winner.

I currently have both an iPad 4 and iPad mini for evaluation purposes and the mini is just so much lighter. But the form factor on the 4 is better for trying to actually do anything other than browse (typing anything, etc).

The majority of people who have bought Android tablets did so because they do not like Apple rather than because they wanted something with a smaller screen.

Or one of many other features Apple won't offer. Smaller screen, lower price, ports (SD slot, USB without a dongle, etc), form factors (Transformer-style keyboard dock), stylus support, etc. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some people bought the Thrive just for the replaceable battery...

Some people will even have bought Android tablets purely because that's what their smartphones use. Not *that* many, though, because I don't think people are thinking as much about cross-device integration as they could be.

The real question why are we so fascinated with Jobs even after he died. He made mistakes just like everyone else. That said, I expect the original iPad that took years of development needed to be the slightly larger size as to support the equipment of the time to meet the price. After it was released, and the year of R&D the other companies took the iPad as a model and was able to incorporate the newer technology thus being able to make a smaller model.

Apple will need to defend their original plans, as well not sacrifice their iPod Touch/iPhone designs.

Was job wrong... No he sold a boat load of these things. However as time went on peoples desires had change. I think the iPad if it started small may not have been so hot, as people were looking for bigger screens at the time.

Back in the 80's PC were popular in a configuration where the monitor sat on top of the CPU. Then it went to towers, in the 90's was the old design wrong? No, it was that people needed to use the floppy disks much more and needed access to the CPU all the time. Then with bigger hard drives it went to something you could interact less with. So a tower you can put under your desk was preferable.

> That's not what I wrote. I wrote: "the iPad created the concept of desirable device called a tablet, that was different from a big phone."

No it didn't. Pretty much the entire rest of the industry had similar alternatives. There was even an "iPad knockoff" released 6 months prior to the iPad. It was just released by a company that's not a media darling.

Apple hit on a good combination while being noticed.

Anything beyond that is mindless fanboy nonsense.

Immediately, there were disputes about what other varations might be useful. That which the iCult didn't approve of was immediately dismissed. That mindless tyrannical approach has now been proven wrong.

The Free Market won out over Fascism.

So it wasn't a desirable tablet. You make my case for me.

Yes, Apple did it right, and was in a position to create a market. Just as I said.

Talking of fanboy nonsense. You really are a ridiculous person.

Since sockets are thicker than the DIPs themselves and one of the goals was for thin, it doesn't seem unreasonable that the memory isn't upgradable. As for bus slots, well there is that Apple port that has all sorts of potential, if Apple would allow it to be used. The pinouts are there, it is the OS that restricts what can and cannot be plugged into it.

What Apple did was make a device that worked (relatively) smoothly. While everyone else was dicking around with picking a particular feature set, Apple produced a music player, phone, and tablet that people wanted to use. Case closed. It's not because it did more, or because it was built better, it's because it was (relatively) nice to use. Someone else could have done this sooner, by picking goals which could reasonably be reached with the technology of the day. Instead they always had to push the technology and use every little bit of it from the beginning with the result that they often tried to do too much and wound up sucking.

Today, practically any device is pleasant to use, because we have finally reached the point where you can throw more silicon at the problem in a portable device. People are all excited about how smooth their dual core phone is, well no shit, whole corporations ran on less processing power until not very long ago. But lots of us will annoyingly and repeatedly point out things like the speed of user experience on 8MHz 68k machines back in the day, including graphics and multitasking, scalable fonts, et cetera. This will not turn into a detailed rant about why programmers today need to man up and go back to assembly, it's just an observation. The point is that we all can have craploads of computing power in our pockets now if we choose to have it, so now the major differentiator is going to switch from whether they manage to make a working product at all from how pleasant it is to use and how pleasant they are to deal with. What Apple accomplished was bringing that sense of pleasantness to mobile devices. We had plenty of wow factor before, but very little polish.

The problem I have with audiobooks, and especially with the concept of listening to them while driving is the amount of mental bandwidth required to actually listen to them and follow the story/argument/whatever.

Radio is generally disposable noise you can ignore and what follows is still comprehensible. Listening to a book requires comparable attention to reading it. Not good if you are in traffic. And if you aren't really paying attention to it - why bother? Listen to music instead.